Care as Infrastructure

Leadership, Design, and Justice

I’m starting this newsletter to follow my doctoral and personal research in public.

This post is adapted from my PhD admissions essay for Antioch University’s PhD in Leadership and Change. I’ve submitted my application, and I haven’t been accepted yet. Either way, this essay is the clearest “origin document” I have for the questions I’m carrying into this work, and this newsletter is where I’m starting to do it in public.

I’m naming public programs and institutions where I was a student, fellow, or affiliated faculty (like TWU, THECB, and the University of Minnesota), and I’m anonymizing the organizations where I’ve been employed to keep the focus on patterns rather than particulars.

I won’t be sharing confidential internal details here. I’m here to talk about design, leadership practice, and what it costs to do care work inside systems that were not built for human variance.

Only the bosses?

In Fall 2025, my nine-year-old son and I were in the middle of one of our regular, wide-ranging conversations about fairness and power, the kind that makes me pause and wonder how someone so young sees the world so clearly. I was telling him about a work policy that had me stuck, and he interrupted with the kind of question adults tend to avoid because it is too efficient.

“But if it doesn’t work,” he said, “why can’t you just do it because you need it? Or change the policy?”

I laughed a little, not because it was funny, but because it was so clean. So direct. The kind of clarity that exposes how much of adult life is organized around accepting unnecessary limits. I told him, “I’m not in a position to make those decisions.”

“Only the bosses?” he asked.

“Yeah, bud. Only the bosses.”

He paused the way he does when he is building a whole internal model of how something works. Then he said, very matter-of-factly, “Well, you should go be a boss, because people really need nice bosses.”

He was right, and not only in the way children are unexpectedly wise. What he was naming was the gap between care and authority. I had been doing leadership work for years, redesigning systems and building programs that try to protect dignity and expand access, often without the title or positional power to make decisions that hold. In that moment, I could finally see myself through the eyes of someone who lives closest to my care, and who also watches me extend it outward.

He is, in many ways, the ultimate stakeholder of my leadership. He knows my care does not stop with him. He has watched me care about people we will never meet, argue for what is fair, and build extra space into systems so that human need does not become a penalty. His question was simple, but it named the center of my work: if a policy harms people, it is not neutral, and it is not inevitable. It can be redesigned.

Leading without the title

For 13 years, I have been redesigning systems, building programs, advocating for students and colleagues, and creating infrastructure that outlived the moment and scaled beyond my original context. I have led without a formal title, without positional authority, and often without the supports that make leadership sustainable. Along the way, my roles have been labeled teacher, curriculum writer, specialist, professor, librarian. Those titles carried meaning, but they also carried a boundary: in most of them, you are expected to work inside the system as it is, even when you can see clearly who it serves and who it leaves behind.

Because I have rarely been positioned as “the leader,” I have led through service and support. I lead by making it safer for other people to show up as themselves, not as an affect, but because I genuinely see them and I am genuinely glad they are there. The feedback I have received over the years has been remarkably consistent. People tell me they felt comfortable, understood, and capable around me. They tell me I made it easier to ask questions. One of my favorite notes, from my time as a digital learning specialist, was simple: “If I had known you were this easy to talk to, I would have reached out sooner.” I think about that often, because it captures what care looks like in practice, not as sentiment, but as access.

My son’s comment forced a question I had avoided: what happens when care is the center of your leadership, but you are operating inside institutions that treat care as optional, invisible, or endlessly extractable from the people who provide it? I have been doing leadership work that centers care. I have just been doing it in systems that do not consistently extend that same care to the people doing the work.

Care work in an institution, and the question it raised

In my current role as an Open Education Librarian at a large public university in Texas, I do care work every day. I design programs that center faculty voice and student experience. I build systems with flexibility and invitation rather than mandates and pressure. I advocate for people who will never know I advocated for them. Most days, my work is an ongoing attempt to create conditions where more people can learn, grow, and become, even when I cannot possibly meet everyone my systems will touch.

Over time, and through candid conversations with colleagues across roles and institutions, I have become convinced of something that now shapes my scholarly curiosity. We do not have a leadership problem because individuals lack kindness. We have a leadership problem because our systems are not designed to support humans, including the humans doing the caring. Too often, institutions reward outcomes, optics, and compliance while treating care as infinite, invisible, and available on demand. The result is predictable: burnout becomes normalized, accommodation becomes negotiation, and the people holding communities together are asked to do it with fewer and fewer supports.

The pattern I keep repeating

Before I had language for leadership identity, I had a recurring pattern. I would inherit a system that was functioning, but not for everyone, notice who was being left out or quietly carrying the cost, and redesign it with care at the center. Then I would document what I built so someone else could adapt it and the gap would stay smaller after I left. This has been true across my work in K–12 education, district-level professional learning and technology systems, and higher education.

It is also how I learn. I am a self-directed learner by necessity and by temperament. When I encounter a gap in a system, I do not wait for someone else to solve it. I research, prototype, iterate, and build something that makes the system kinder and more workable for whoever comes after me.

Looking back, I can name another throughline I first put into words during my master’s program: adaptive expertise. In a paper I wrote in 2016, I described adaptive experts as people who can balance efficiency and innovation, sustaining what works while also moving beyond routine when the routine starts harming the learner, the employee, or the community. That framework still feels like the most accurate description of how my leadership operates. I build structures that can run without constant heroics, and then I pay attention to the moment the structure stops fitting real humans. When that happens, I assess, I listen, I adjust, and I redesign. My instinct has never been to protect the system for its own sake. My instinct is to protect people by changing the system.

Adaptive expertise is not solitary for me. It depends on feedback loops and peer learning, the same way I learned as a teacher: reflect, get coached, refine, and try again.

A fellowship that helped me name what I was already doing

That shift sharpened for me in early October 2025, when I traveled to Austin for the kickoff convening of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) OER Fellowship. Our cohort gathered for eight months of collaboration, shared learning, and capstone projects we will ultimately hand back to the field. During the convening, we were introduced to Kouzes and Posner’s The Leadership Challenge, a research-based framework distilled from thousands of “personal-best” leadership stories into five observable practices. As I read them, I felt a familiar jolt, not because they were new, but because they described what I have been quietly doing for years.

I recognized myself in “Model the Way,” not as charisma, but as transparency: showing my work, keeping promises visible, and making criteria inspectable so trust has something solid to stand on. I recognized myself in “Inspire a Shared Vision,” because I do not want spectators, I want co-authors: I name what could be, connect it to lived experience, and hand others the pen. I recognized myself in “Challenge the Process,” because I treat constraints as creative prompts, pilot in public, and retire what no longer serves. I recognized myself in “Enable Others to Act,” because capacity-building is where my instincts live: pairing strengths, removing friction, and distributing decision-making so momentum belongs to the group rather than to me. And I recognized myself in “Encourage the Heart,” because I am always trying to make invisible labor visible, offering specific recognition that says, in plain language, I saw you, and what you did mattered.

Seeing my instincts reflected back through research did not simply validate me. It clarified the spine of how I lead. My leadership identity is grounded in a few commitments that show up repeatedly: care as a design requirement, dignity as non-negotiable, lived experience as legitimate knowledge, and distributed leadership as a way to scale capacity without depleting people.

Two early case studies in care-as-design

One of my earliest leadership laboratories was a sixth-grade Technology Applications classroom in Texas. After four years teaching reading and English, I stepped into a role with a curriculum that no longer matched students’ lives or how they learned. So I rewrote it.

By year two, the real problem was ethical scale: fourteen classes, roughly 300 students. If the classroom was going to be humane, it could not depend on me being superhuman. I built a flipped, self-paced model with reflection built in, and I designed a peer tech support system that distributed expertise and normalized help-seeking. A substitute once told me the class ran on “autopilot.” It looked calm because the care was structural: predictable routines, multiple pathways, and support that preserved student dignity.

Later, in a large urban Texas school district, I moved into a district-level digital learning role where the ratio of teachers to specialists made individualized support impossible. A Campus Technology Liaison program existed, but the experience was uneven and often felt like compliance without partnership. A colleague and I redesigned the program around transparency, shared learning, clear timelines, and feedback loops that actually changed the program. Over time, it shifted from a mechanism of central-office expectations into something closer to a support community.

These experiences taught me that leadership is often invisible because it looks like design: making support predictable, creating structures that distribute expertise, and building systems that hold people with dignity.

Open Education as justice work

I did not arrive in Open Education through theory. I arrived through need.

In 2020, teaching as an adjunct at Texas Woman’s University, I adopted an open textbook because it was free, strong, and meant students could start on day one. In a semester full of labs, rehearsals, and jobs, required materials were never just materials. That book was relief.

In my current role at a large public university in Texas, I stepped into an OER program with real impact through adoption and grants. I respected what was already working, and I also saw what was missing: community infrastructure and clearer pathways to participation and leadership, especially for students. My first year was an intentional season of listening and learning, paired with formal development through the University of Minnesota’s Certificate in Open Education Librarianship, which strengthened how I think about open education as an ecosystem of resources, pedagogy, policy, relationships, and labor.

That foundation shaped what I built next through the THECB OER Fellowship: the Open Education Trailblazers Badge Program and a mini-grant redesign that pays faculty for inquiry, not just adoption. Faculty explore OER in their discipline and write a brief landscape reflection; adoption is welcome, but not required. This is how I practice justice-oriented change: reducing barriers to access, treating lived experience as legitimate knowledge, and designing conditions where people can enter without shame and move at a human pace.

What I’m doing here

This newsletter is a public workspace for the questions that won’t leave me alone:

What does it look like to build care into the infrastructure of organizations, so care is not a performance, a personality trait, or a private sacrifice?

If you’re doing this work too, you’re in the right place. Here’s what you can expect:

• Care ethics as organizational design, not just interpersonal virtue

• Universal design beyond the classroom: policy, communication, evaluation, crisis response

• Adaptive expertise: sustaining what works, redesigning what harms

• Open education as justice work and community-building

• Tools, templates, and design patterns you can actually use

If you want to stay in this inquiry with me, subscribe.